Chapter 3

I-80 intersects 395. 395 South springs away mercifully fast at first across the top of Reno, as the big signs say

We Have A Slot For You!

No Lease Required:

Washer, Dryer and Fireplace!

We’re The Cream: $435 A Month!

For Sale, For Rent, Vacancy, Vacancy—

Freeway Ends—1¼ Mile.

And so it does, in a surly tangle of paving machinery, on an overpass to nowhere. Ground level now, still headed south from Reno, down the backside of the Sierra Nevada.

In Nevada, there are no zoning regulations. Or it’s difficult to figure what they are. In Nevada, three quarters of the people live in trailer houses. In Nevada the ’60s never happened. There is no rock music, only star-spangled country western. In Nevada, all the highway signs are dimpled by shotgun pellets, and all the private signs say

Steak, Lobster, Ribs, Drinks!

Saloon, Slots, Trailer Park!

Win Gold, Cars, Trips, Spas—plus CASH!

Tahoe LAKESIDE—you have friends in high places!

ZERO to $650,000 in 6 SECS!

It’s what you come to Tahoe for—

RIGHT LANE ENDS.

Fleeing south now on a two-lane road. California’s mountain towers march along, a cool inviting presence of sanity on the right. Hype recedes to forlorn little messages: “For Sale by Owner—” But then, just as the desert seems about to win, and tumbleweeds begin to stack against the fences:

Carson City 32 Miles!

Be A Winner!

Tom was riding with his eyes shut. “I don’t think there’s anybody,” he said suddenly, “if they had a choice, who wouldn’t want to be conceived in love.”

Here we go again. In manus tuas Domine commendo spiritum meum. “Oh,” I said, “I bet you were.”

“Like to think I was.” He was warming to his subject. “—But I can’t ever know. People lie to each other. They lie to you. Especially about—well, matters of that kind.”

I couldn’t say a thing.

“—You see so many couples, man and wife, spend their whole time in slagging and belittling,” he said. “Distaste. Disaffection. Disgust. Disrespect. Well, I suppose that God makes all, but still, if I knew my flesh had been made up of that, I’d have trouble holding up my head.

“I decided, any kid of mine ought to know right off he was conceived in love. Never need to make up pretty stories to keep himself warm. And if I hadn’t that to give them, I’d have none. Have myself fixed so I couldn’t.

“Don’t know if that makes sense. But I’d feel being born of a passing pleasure made me pretty light stuff too. Like cheap ready-to-wear. I’d be the last to say that passing pleasure can’t be very pleasant, but I wouldn’t want my flesh and bones made up of it. It wears thin.”

Now the big signs march along competing with the mountains:

$50,000 Keno!

400 Slots!

Carson Nugget 17.5 Miles!

“God, I was worn thin. So thin when we first met. You could see light between any two threads of me. Larger and larger part of my time was bein’ spent using up strangers. No matter whether or not they wanted to get used: because they did. And they do. But I was getting used up fastest of the lot. One day all the fun was over. I just woke up, wanted to pack it all in and go home, take him home with me. Only I hadn’t any home to take him to.

“So I just went on and on. The drugs and liquor don’t help, but at the time, y’know, it seems they might. So it was on and on: nobody caught me at it. Like I was hoping someone might catch me at it. Nobody caught me at it. Except you.”

“I didn’t catch you at it,” I said, tears approaching surely as the next casino. “I never saw you do anything.”

“Maybe not, but you did something.”

“It was all an accident.”

“Don’t believe in accidents,” he said.

Ormsby House!

Four Restaurants, Two Swimming Pools!

2000 Rooms!

Enjoy Free Dining!

Children’s Lounge! 12.5 Miles!

“Never gave the future much thought. Could be, I supposed, I’d got no future coming. But thinking about—well, about Harlan with no future coming—that was just something I could not support.

“I’d gotten so I understood losing my own family; they all died. Wasn’t anybody’s fault, not even mine.

“But losing his family, now that I did for him. I ought, I wanted to be, his roof in the cold. Crutch for his weakness. Medicine for his pain. And if I hadn’t been a very good boy, wasn’t because I didn’t know what I signed up for.

“Worse yet, only way I saw of doing it was to make some viable future for myself. Y’see what I mean?”

I nodded silently. There were connections in what he said, which I could hear but wasn’t getting, or which some part of my mind was getting very well, just refusing to share with the rest. The car buzzed along.

Suddenly he snickered. “Wouldn’t want to have popped out of a turkey baster, either.”

The car hopped over a desert rise onto the main drag of Carson City. And main was almost all the drag there was. Out on the edge sprawl shopping centers, new and tacky, flat ground-gobbling buildings: land is cheap. None look over five years old, or built to last more than ten. Auto dealerships, RV sales, pizza, Taco Bell. Food, gas, diesel, bait. Then the motels.

Then a sign: Carson City Urban Area: what used to be the town, bulbous neon casino signs—24 Hour Poker Bar! Shrimp Cocktails $1.00!—and old brick buildings housing multiple pawnshops, The Pony Express Hotel, Chinese Food, Irene’s Bar, Video Poker! Easy Slots!—and—

Tom elbowed me. The Salvation Army Store: showcase windows, and six high-mileage, bouffant hairdo mannequins standing shoulder-to-shoulder right across the front! They all were wearing wedding gowns. “Want to get yours there?”

“Nope. Got mine.”

I punched my seat belt loose, let the VW coast, lifted my butt free of the seat, slipped the wool skirt down around my ankles, and quick! Whipped it off and stomped the gas before the car stalled.

Wide-eyed and unguarded, Tom appraised me. I had molted. The damp white mini dress was a little crunched just now, but like a dragonfly’s wings, sun and breeze would bring it out.

“Hey! That’s it!”

A little green sign arrowing off to the right:

Marriage Licenses

park in rear

Too late to turn. I hung a big U around the neoclassic bulk of Ormsby House, a Proletarian Pleasure Palace built for giants, and drove slowly in the opposite direction, one block closer to the hills.

Main Street was a countrified midway. Then came the state buildings, leafy and sedately out of place with their historical markers, their cannons on the lawn. One block to either side lived in a different century.

Drowsy, desolate, full of small secret life. Pigeons courting on the buckled sidewalks. Tall old cottonwoods: crows in the tops broadcast their views with all the force of radio evangelists. Tall old nineteenth-century mansions, some for rent. Vacant lots, desert-bright, where mansions used to stand. Nineteenth-century cottages housing—

Wedding chapels.

Well, at least these didn’t look like card parlors or funeral homes; rather like gypsy spiritualists instead:

MADAME LEONA will READ

the FUTURE in your PALM:

LOVE, MARRIAGE, MONEY,

BUSINESS, PERSONAL.

You know the look. Lace-curtain nefarious.

I put us in the middle of a vacant lot. No Trespassing signs hung from a chain around it, but the chain lay in the gravel. Lots of tire tracks wandered in and out.

Next door a big Victorian and lesser antique structures rimmed a square of grass. A faded neon sign on a pole in the middle of the grass said Serendipity Square.

It was a place divided like a nursery school into play areas or fantasy locales, only here the daydreams were for older children. Right from the sidewalk I could see The Livery Stable with Ye Olde Hitching Rack in front, a Photographer’s Shoppe, with racks of frills for dressing up in, an arbor arched above a swan boat from The Tunnel of Love—and in between it all, beds of black-eyed Susans, herbs, marigolds, and leggy old roses nobody pinched the hips off. Along the edges of the walk, onion plants produced fat yellow onions at their bases.

The shed nearest the street was Rhett’s Stage Stop. Sidewalk changed to boardwalk in its shade. A real live wedding was going on inside, but you couldn’t see in very well because of the rococo message painted on the glass:

Office for Chapels

Follow Footprints

Your Choice of Four Chapels in Serendipity Square:

Scarlett’s Chapel (Elegant)

Rhett’s Stage Stop (Western)

Wedding Parlor (Homey)

Garden Chapel (In Season)

Special Offer to You: Less than Cost

Greatest variety of Marriage

Safest, Fastest, and Finest Marriages in the World.

OFFICE

Hopeful white paint footprints pace the boardwalk, but they’re not going our way.

Across the street, the State Building wears the dowdy and abandoned graces of a 1920s city high school: same huge, somnolent rumble of air conditioning, same chain link around the light wells. In the shadow of its wings lies a little gravel parking lot. On its rustic stone hang four green signs and a white one: the white one says

Do Not Park

In The

Middle Of This Lot

The green ones say, in order, left to right

City Prison Van

State Prison Van

City Delivery Van

Marriage Licenses Downstairs This Building

Down, down two steps at a time, to blond wood and gray linoleum, the standard institutional smell. There was a chest-high counter and desks and file cabinets, and two women clerks. A little prop-up sign on the counter said

License Fee $25.00

Cash Only

This License Must Be Used

In the State of Nevada

Correct Change Is Required

After 4:00 p.m. and

On Weekends and Holidays

“Hullo,” said Tom.

The papers seemed perfectly straightforward. There was nothing reasonable to prevent anyone at all from getting a marriage license, and no place he could use it but the State of Nevada. Even the ballpoints on the counter worked. Tom paid the clerk too much, and told her to keep the change.

He said, “I’m about to ask a dumb question. Have you a paper handy with the wording of your marriage vows?”

“Oh no, honey,” said the older woman. “Each one of those J.P.’s just has his own he likes to use.”

“J.P.’s?”

“I’m sorry, honey: Justice of the Peace. Get so used to people knowing what I mean.”

“Could I speak to him?”

“Well there’s no J.P. here Sundays, you know, that’s the problem. Used to be they took turns on the holidays, but with the budget like it is—”

I would have said about now, had anybody asked me, “It isn’t going to turn out like the rings.”

“There’s the chapels of course—” she said, still flustering with his money “—right across the street and they’re every one open till midnight—”

Good thing nobody asked me.

“—Come back Mondays through Saturdays now,” she called after us. “You could just step down the hall—”

The boardwalk led around the Stage Stop. There the footprints descended, onto the cracked and grassy walks of Serendipity Square. And it was hard not to follow that row of white prints around the corner once the suggestion had been made—very hard—in fact, it must have been too hard.

A well-dressed man shot out the front door of the big house and almost scampered toward the Stage Stop. He froze when he saw us, as a squirrel does, noticing it’s not alone.

Tom waved.

“May I help you?”

“Depends,” said Tom. “We were hoping to get married.”

“Did you have an appointment? Trouble is, we’re so insanely busy—Weddings in three out of the four already, you know—There’s no Justice over there on Sundays—”

“Right. Well, we were leaving anyway.”

“No, no! Wait, why don’t you see my wife? She’s just inside—” pointing behind him to where painted footprints marched up wooden steps.

“Hullo, ma’am.”

To the left inside the dim house a long velvet room (obviously Scarlett’s Chapel, elegant) bulged at the double doors with a wedding in progress. To the right, closed parlor doors (homey) and muffled voices.

The woman at the desk raised faded eyes.

“We’ve no appointment I’m afraid; we didn’t know—” Tom tucked his head, studied his shoes. It was an almost scandalously foregone conclusion.

“Oh dear, oh dear, are you sweet people all the way from England?”

“Your husband said there might be some small something y’could do—”

“You know, the papers, the newspapers do pieces on us all the time, why just last Sunday—I’ve got Xerox copies, I should give you one—the years we’ve done these chapels, we’ve had couples from thirty-five different countries —”

Tom’s eyes moved up to hers.

“From England,” she murmured. “What a long way.”

“Yes ma’am, it is.”

“Oh dear.”

———

It was built of lattice, held firm by a hundred summers of white paint. It crouched in a narrow side yard, an old iron fence between it and the street, like it was playing hide-and-seek and we were the first to find it. Leaves fluttered down around it from the cottonwoods. Crows cawed lustily. White butterflies visited the grass. A white wicker table and chairs furnished its insides. The chairs had plastic cushions puddled by a sprinkler. Another wicker object might have been an altar or a buffet, depending. Around the sides on pedestals were wicker urns of plastic flowers, aged and sunburned to a median orange.

“Wait,” called Tom. “One thing, are those removable? I’m sorry, but I can’t stand plastic flowers. They make me think of cemeteries.”

The stands were lashed to the lattice with electrical wire, but the plastic bouquets came off. When they were gone, the little garden chapel stood even more dreamlike and forlorn, a childhood place: not even your own childhood, Ray Bradbury’s childhood, maybe. Old and thoughtful. Spooky-gracious.

Its floor was all uneven, with half bricks and homemade concrete pavers set in it like precious stones and painted glossy red and glossy green, as if your grandfather did it himself and Grandpa was more loving than handy. Here came the woman with her husband and another man, very tall, very old. He wore a hearing aid behind one ear and gold rim glasses. His black suit had a green patina. Ray Bradbury would have loved him.

Reverend Such-and-Such I didn’t catch (retired) shook both of our hands. His own were slow and warm, withered as the desert evening. Tom asked his question about the wording of the vows. He’d clasped me firmly from the back, both arms, just as he’d done when asking after rings.

“The State requires me to determine of you both your true intent,” said the Reverend Such-and-Such, sweet old ponderous pulpit-voice punctuated by the click of dentures, “and if your true and uncoerced intent is to marry, that I pronounce you man and wife in the name of the State—”

“That’s all?”

“Whatever else you wish, if you wish to be more—”

“No,” said Tom emphatically. “That’s what I wish. Exactly that. No more.”

“And your given name is Thomas?”

“Yes, sir. Hers is Miranda.”

“That’s all I need.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The old man draws a long formal breath.

“Now understand,” says Tom, “I’ve no objections to your mentioning the presence of God, so long as y’make it short.”

The old man opens his mouth.

“—Short and kind,” says Tom.

“Dearly Beloved—”

“And dignified,” says Tom.

The old man smiles at him. “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here this evening for the purpose of uniting this couple, before God and man, in the loving bonds of holy matrimony (take her hand)—”

“Right.”

Tom slips his left hand down to find my left. Late sun bores in sideways, molten amber casting silver shadows, but where it shines through the orange diamonds, blood-red light-drops spatter both our arms.

“—Thomas, do you take this woman, Miranda, to be your lawful wedded wife, to love and to cherish as long as you both do live?”

“Right. I do.”

The old man smiles at Tom again, before asking me the same. “Do you have rings?” (plain gold ones, like old country people wear—) “Repeat after me, ‘Take this ring, and wear it as a symbol of my lasting love—’” (—the kind that, if you leave on long enough—)

“Take this ring and wear it as a symbol of—”

“By the authority vested in me by the State of Nevada, I now pronounce you man and wife.”

———

I was sitting in the car.

Everything was dizzyingly dazzlingly hot. Trying to remember now, how to put the key into the lock. Almost went to sleep standing up, there in the summerhouse. Tom kissed me. Warm arms, warm front, warm mouth, sweet breath, sweet dark. Sleep forever. Then he let go, and I had to stand on my own. Remember him handing out hundred-dollar bills.

Tom said softly but distinctly, “Goddamn bloody frigging fucking hypocrites.”

I must have jumped a mile. I’m sitting in the car.

“Oh, not those people—they’re honest people—It’s the government, that’s what it is.”

I find the lock, and put the key in it.

“I hate the government: license me to love, will they? I could be lying! Do they care? I could be planning to unload you in a year: they’d help me to fill out the forms for it! And you could be planning to shake me down for mental cruelty and half of everything I own! You could! Nothing easier: just tell ’em everything. And would they mind? God, no, so long as you paid the taxes on it. But license me to cherish? What the hell do they know?

“Harlan and me—do you realize, that if one of us had sex change operations, they would let us marry? Think about it. I think about Harlan—he has the most beautiful body—I have ever seen. On man or woman either. He wouldn’t strip, or show it off on stage, Oh no. It’s not in his nature. I don’t know if you can understand, he’s very—”

“Chaste,” I said. The kind of information that I don’t forget. It stopped him open mouthed.

“After his fashion.” (Now he’s forgotten that he told me.) “Takes a clown like me to do that.

“Every cell in his body is male, believe me. And I love it. It’s not just that he’s got—that he’s—Well he does, y’know. And I’m very fond of—about the dearest thing I know, feeling him get—when I—Ah God, I don’t want to talk to you about that!

“God made him right the first time!

“And if he would go in a clinic, and have himself cut, and take those shots; if he would go through all that pain and shame to make a sideshow travesty of himself, your government would write him out new papers saying he was female, and a license saying he could be my lawful wedded love in public! They’d laugh at us, of course, but they’d pat us on the heads and say ‘All right!’

“And he wouldn’t ever be a woman.

“I couldn’t ever have children from him, any more than him from me: he’d just be my Harlan ruined and wasted—he’d be an abomination, and so would I if it didn’t give me the horrors to touch him! But your fucking government would call that satisfaction from us!”

He looked away out of his window, wiping his face where I almost couldn’t see it. Defiantly, he turned back eye-to-eye.

“Sooner do it to myself. Much sooner. Well what are you crying for?”

“I don’t have Harlan’s looks.”

“Who does? If that’s your only problem, you’re in great shape.”

“You do.”

“Sorry. And I thrive on flattery as well as the next. Nothing wrong with your looks, anyway.”

“I’m flat-chested. I’ve got no hips!”

“Well, it’s better than having too many! Now, I quite like the way the way you’re built.”

“You would. I’m built like a guy!”

“Oh no you’re not!”

“Besides, you couldn’t marry him if you both had fifty operations!”

“Yes I could! It’s legal!”

“No you couldn’t!”

“Why not? You tell me why not!”

“Because it’s bigamy! That’s why not! You’re married to me!”

We sat in the front seat of the old VW bus, in the vacant lot where some grand house once stood, in dusty furnace-hot Carson City, Nevada, and stared at one another.

His silver eyes were wide with amazement, and filled around the edges with fresh tears. One loose tear, forgotten, found an escape route down his cheek.

I wanted to touch it. Wipe it.

I wanted to touch him. I wanted to pull him right inside of me, and never let him out.

Tom gave a kind of delayed strangled screech. He grabbed my waist in both hands and bounced me bodily up: my knees smacked into the steering wheel and my ear grazed the roof; I was traveling a perfect arc, over the back of the driver’s seat, into the mid seat of the bus. Touchdown: the Eagle Has Landed.

I did some fancy screeching of my own: The sun shone on the seat, the vinyl was hot enough to fry eggs. But Tom was coming down on top of me—He was on top of me, and he was hotter than the seat by orders of magnitude.

———

You know all that trendy business in the schools, the rah-rah programs to molest-proof kids? They had the nerve to tell us, “You have to learn you are free to say no.”

I made radical trouble at that point, and a really evil name for myself, by raising my hand and saying, “We aren’t ‘free to say no!’ Not unless we’re also free to say ‘yes!’

“What a bunch of hypocritical schlock! We’re required to say ‘no,’ that’s what you’re saying: we’re under obedience to our parents, the schools, the cops; we aren’t allowed to be sexual. What’s with this ‘Free to say no’?”

Ground Zero, you guys!

Free to say yes!

Has anybody thought to teach me how?

All I know is, if I raise an eye, I’ll find the entire van surrounded by raunchy paunchy Nevadans in iridescent mirror shades and cowboy hats.

But there wasn’t any crowd of strangers watching. I was the only stranger watching. And watching. Watching me and watching him. Ut Videam. I didn’t know how to stop.

Suddenly, a tenable reason why we shouldn’t get it on in the parking lot. I tried to wriggle and say, “No!” Only the wriggling worked; my mouth was occupied. And wriggling is subject to misinterpretation.

Wriggle and squirm and go, “Mmwpf!”

Wonderfully unsuccessful. He was stronger than I was.

“Wedding night!”

“Don’t shout!”

Silence. The still, hot, drowsy car knew one sound, heavy breathing. His. Mine. We were wound up in each other like a bucket of snakes. “Sorry,” I whispered in his ear. “What I meant to say was, I only plan to have one wedding night, and I would very much like to do it right.”

Tom sat up, and I sat in his lap. There was no other car but ours in the entire blazing vacant lot. “I can understand that,” he said.

I watched a lizard scoot across the gravel. Another followed it.

“Fact is, I can understand quite well. Furthermore, I know exactly what to do about that. C’mon.”

———

Back on the main drag, headed south. Married. And getting close to the edge of town. But the middle of Carson City is close to the edge of town.

“Hey.”

We were passing a sun-blasted shopping plaza, around a Skagg’s market. A sign on the market’s front said Liquors.

I parked against Skagg’s plate glass. All across the store, just inside the glass and long before you came to the food, stood a phalanx of slot machines, and before every one stood a middle-aged woman in polyester, pulling the handle, letting it go. Putting in money, pulling the handle. One left empty-handed; a sister took her place.

Tom also came out empty-handed.

We saw one other liquor store, featuring slots: Tom did such a fast in-out there it amounted to a rebound. “You’d think,” he said, “a place like this’d want more liquor to get by.”

True: there would have been a Liquor Barn on every block in California. Now we were on the edge of town. We passed an empty field, a well diggers’ supply, a feed-and-grain. Then a little pink house made over to a store. The sign said Marge’s Licker Locker.

Hold it.

Marge was pushing fifty, bare-armed and burly. She tendered Tom the wistful once-over some people save for brand-new Cadillacs.

“I’ve just been in two bottle shops,” he said, “and asked them for their best champagne. The clerk said this, and I said ‘Wrong,’ and he said thus-and-such, and I said ‘Wrong—’ I found nothing there worth over twenty pounds! I must not be expressing myself too plainly in the local patois. What I meant to put across: I want the best all-out fuck-’em-dead champagne in the state of—”

He looked perplexed. I said, “Nevada.”

Marge’s eyes bounced back and forth from Tom to me for several seconds, like a spectator’s at a tennis match. She shook herself. “Hold on, now.” She gave a last speculative look at Tom over her shoulder. “You’re English, ain’t ya?” She went, and from the back came splintering crate sounds, popping staples, ripping cardboard.

Tom shook his head. “Feel really foolish never remembering the name of this place: must put me in mind of something I don’t want to think about—”

“‘Neva’ is Spanish for ‘snow’,” I whispered, and regretted it: his look could have withered trees.

“Didn’t have to say that.”

Marge came back with a bottle. Instead of a paper label, a name was painted on the glass in art nouveau sinuosity: “Perrier-Jouet, la Fluor de Champagne.” While on every side, white painted opium poppies swayed and danced against the green glass bottle, and hung their drowsy heads.

Tom’s eyes kindled. “All reet petite. Why didn’t y’say so in the first place?”

“—’Cause I don’t carry this, is why. It’s special for a lady out of town. One of her friends from the coast is partial to it.”

I reached up, and whispered, “Whorehouse,” in Tom’s ear. He gave me a startled look. “Legal in Nevada.”

“Like instant weddings?” he whispered back.

“More like slot machines.”

“God.” Then to Licker Lady, “How much are you asking?”

“—Now she don’t like people to mess with her orders. Still, I suppose one of these babies could get broken. Never has, but you know it’s always possible—I just know that I remember you from someplace.”

“How much?”

“One hundred dollars.”

“Oh God!” Tom squawked. “What’d y’do? Pack it in on native porters?”

“I’m a businesswoman, be fair: I gotta charge something for a breakage fee.” But she threw in two cheap glasses and a cooler of ice. Her last words, plaintive, longing, drifted down the steps behind us: “You wouldn’t be on the soaps, would you?”

———

The desert softened; it reverted to the nineteenth century with a sigh the minute Carson City fell behind. There were katydids singing in the grass. Dead skunks on the road. Lights coming on in squat, substantial farmhouses. And squat, substantial steers and quarter horses standing up to their bellies in sweet pasture.

Down behind the mountain, but still making himself known on his long retreat to the west, the sun spouted an amazing baroque fan of coral rays into the sky. The nearest ridge was gray-brown burlap stitched black for thickets and ravines. The one behind was flat dark purple, a cutout in wool felt. The height behind that was mauve, and behind that stood another, palest lavender; absurdly, almost tearfully like that place in the song:

Oh beautiful for spacious skies

For amber waves of grain (oat hay in this case)

For purple mountain majesties

Above

the fruited

plain.

Getting atop those mountains from the fruited plain is a two-hour’s drive on the California side. Fifteen rock-hard vertical minutes does it from the east: up Woodford’s Canyon where the West Fork of the Carson tumbles down its shadowy chute into Nevada.

The old VW lugs on up and up the darkening grade. A doe high-steps her twin fawns through my headlights. Our first California sign says “Toiyabe National Forest: Land Of Many Uses.”

Above lie Faith, Hope, and Charity: three high valleys, shallow granite sky-bowls spilling evening light. Mormon settlers named them, clambering up this way with their pushcarts and their piety. The one the road runs through is Hope. And just beyond that, at the very top of Carson Summit, is a sign reading “Amador County Line.”

People notice what pertains to them. Like say, an Australian aborigine can spot a kangaroo in the bush a hundred times faster than a white guy, but the white guy’s faster at coins on the sidewalk. So here’s this sign. I saw Tom’s head crank right around to follow it. “That’s ‘Lover County!’”

“Well,” I said, “they try to make out like it means ‘Love of Gold,’ but that would have been ‘Amor d’Oro’—”

“It’s plain ‘lover.’ A weekend on Ibiza will give y’that much Spanish.” He shut up like a trap.

Caples Lake slips by in the twilight, followed by the looming mass of Carson Spur. Then Silver Lake, twinkling yellow nostalgia from store and lodge and campground. Our highway roller-coasters down the ridges; headlights turn approaching trees to ghosts. The sun has danced away over the edge of the world, “laughing,” as the Psalm puts it, “like a giant to run his race.” One last persimmon smear out by the coast still marks the way he went.

———

Yesterday afternoon, and far out there, I pursued that westering sun across the San Joaquin. My cabin chores were finished, I’d powered up pump and water heater, stowed my groceries, put fresh sheets on my parents’ big bed. Checked off my list of Tings 2 Do.

Getting on toward 3:00, I launched myself downhill for Oakland Coliseum and Bill Graham Presents. Ut videam. Well, I was going to see all right. Hope, depression, fatigue, and adrenalin began to fight it out. Almost an hour from the cabin to the highway, an hour down to Jackson, an hour from Jackson to Stockton across the Valley, pit stop for gas, two cups of coffee, and a fast trip to the bathroom. An hour from Stockton to Oakland Coliseum.

Smog, heat, crawling traffic, sinking sun. Belshangles won’t be on stage yet; your main attraction waits for dark. The Red Hot Chili Peppers might be doing their thing about now.

I abandoned the VW at the rim of the Coliseum lot. One last Ting 2 Do, find a good home for my extra ticket. I have an appreciation for fanatics. Sure enough, on the asphalt by the box-office window still lounged a line, two dozen of the hardcore ticketless. I applied myself to the end of it.

Ahead of me, a tall skinny kid was rattling around in new black Levi’s two sizes narrower than mine. He had blond hair and he’d dyed it black, then he’d dyed it red and it’d all grown out and gotten cut off in patches: it was really decadent if you took a close look. If you didn’t, it looked like mange. The front of his shirt said Psychic TV, and the back, “Brian Jones Died For Your Sins.”

We started to talk. Not that much younger than me; sixteen maybe. Not going to school. Playing guitar (sort of) and looking for a band (sort of). Living in Vallejo. He said his name was Joshua Sweet. I’d known at least a dozen of him. He was cute and sad and last in line. People at the head had hope even now for returns. He didn’t have a prayer. Thought to myself, I’ve found my boy.

I said, “I’ve got something that might interest you.”

We hunched over my purse, away from predatory eyes of types who hoped this was a drug deal they could join. There was the dog-eared envelope with the British stamps, inside that, the colored envelope, inside that, two precious strips of multicolored cardboard:

Bill Graham Presents: A DAY ON THE GREEN

Sunday August 17: BELSHANGLES

and special guests

Reserved Seats

Row Number:

Joshua Sweet gave it the long perusal of a kid who set great store in cool. “Ting, tang, walla-walla bing bang.”

“You might say that.”

He walked me further from the line. “How much?”

“Somebody gave ’em to me. I’ll give you one.”

He thought. “What for?”

“Fun.”

He thought some more. “I can live with that.”

“Look at it this way: I can’t sit on both of ’em.”

The line grew shorter by two bodies. Joshua Sweet and I loped toward the stadium. One last mysterious barricade of fear, that the tickets were a hoax which everyone would spot but me. Not to worry. The takers took ’em, tore ’em, and turned us loose, up the long concrete stairway to heaven.

J. Sweet’s practiced cool evaporated. He’d wanted to see the Chilies. I would’ve liked that too, but you can’t have everything. He’d writhed in helpless torment, hearing the thunder of their set from the Coliseum parking lot.

He’d wanted to see if Kiedis and Flea had the nerve to (or if Bill Graham let ’em) pull in a stadium what they usually did in clubs: get naked for their encore, with a gym sock apiece on their privates.

I went to hear them last October: crushed in the front row of a local club with an idiot crew of dudes who repeated like mantras every last word to the Chilies’ songs, and whose epitome of wit was to shout, “Whazzat in yer pocket?” and make a flying grab at the other’s shirt, to frantic evasion attempts and shrieks of “Fuckitman! You leave my goddamn tit alone!”

Or to bellow “Penis!” back and forth at one another.

I wanted to shout, “Shut up! You guy’s have all got ’em; be a whole lot funnier if you didn’t!”

Finally, there was Anthony Kiedis.

God help us, what a stage presence. He stalked and strutted, swung punches, fondled his crotch, flung himself into the crowd. It was a great act: obnoxious as hell, but great. Male authority at the sub-basement level, like a bull ape hooting and putting on the primal Ritz to the delirious wonder of his tribe.

Then the same stupid thrasher stepped on my head twice in successive kamikaze rushes to the stage. Nobody needs that. I headed for the tables and chairs in back. The whole back quarter of the audience was male. Guys who’d come with guys. The few chicks who’d gotten in the wrong rooting section beat a huffy retreat during the show.

And Kiedis kept egging his audience on to fuck each other (assuming of course, he said, that it was true love), and when that didn’t meet with much compliance, he ordered ’em all to kiss each other like crazy, and they wouldn’t. Somebody shouted that he didn’t want AIDS. I saw the sexual revolution ending, in much the manner T.S. Eliot says the world does.

The man on stage shouted back, “What d’ya mean it isn’t worth it?”

They stared up at him with little kid’s adoration—that said in every line “Look, just look up there! He’s our beauty! That’s what we are! We’d all be lean, splendid, fearless, just like that, if only you could see us right—”

Even then, nine months ago, they’d bagged the “sock” finale. Kiedis climaxed by binding himself, knees to nipples, round and round, with a roll of silver duct tape. A techno-punk Statue of Liberty he stood, and showered his screeching vicarious lovers with “canned confetti,” that spews out wet and white as semen, and dries to papery colored strips.

Nevertheless, J. Sweet kept asking kids he met about the socks. Legendry dies hard, I guess. It did appear the answer was “no.” I could have told him.

People flowed, each head a living corpuscle in the great slow veins of the stadium. Arteries pulsed up and down the concrete stairs. Small streams filtered through the toilets, past sticky soft drink outlets, and hotdogs duded up in catchy hues of mustard, ketchup, and relish. Past bazaars all rich and titillating with their heaps of T-shirts, pins, and programs. Capillaries fed them back into the seats. And the field below, what was that? The pumping heart of the matter, so full of celebrants, they compacted to a solid single flesh.

The crowd amused itself, and waited for its heart’s desire. Recycled soft-drink cups, big tall ones, eight or ten inches of wax-coated red-white-and-blue commercialism, industriously smashed flat, make splendid disposable Frisbees. Collect several dozen, you can fly ’em off the stands at once, joined by hundreds of others’ zealous collections, and the air grows full for a moment of flying jubilation, like a swarm of bees in May. Fifteen minutes, the collectors will have done their work again: gathered up all their waxy colored fliers with newly flattened reinforcements from colas bought and guzzled in the interval—up they go.

We’d put ourselves in the reserved seats, and they were splendid, perfect comfort, perfect view. J. Sweet emitted all the small talk he could think of, and a distinct impression he wasn’t happy sitting there with me. I knew what he wanted to do, go down and mingle. Hack, stab, kill, and bullyrag himself through that human flesh-flow covering the green until his belly touched the stage front.

The man I loved had put my name on the seat I was in. Nobody gets that kind of treasure and the stage front too.

“Who’d you say gifted you with these fine seats?”

I said, “Tommi Rhymer.”

“Himself?”

“Himself.”

“Right. Well that was really—ah—kind of him.”

Well do I know the look; he thinks I’m crazy or druggy or both. “Yeah. It was.”

“Be sure to thank him for me.”

I said, “Will do.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t very much mind—”

“No,” I said, “Feel free.”

Last seen bouncing down the stands, he vanished at the bottom, a grateful fish into the human sea. Darkness falls sedately and seductively, ten thousand wisps of pot smoke rising past it like the sweet odor of evening sacrifice.

Think about the person who marries Tommi Rhymer. What will she get for her portion? Backstage, for sure. In his dressing room, in the limo, in his bed. But never front-row center anymore. I hadn’t penetrated the outmost of those places: and here already, a wave of nostalgia for front-row center. I felt remote and solitary as the moon.

Canned rock thunders from the speakers. Monster video screens flash bright seductive images above the stage. Down on the field a dude is getting tossed in a blanket: popping up from human anonymity with arms and legs spread wide and flailing, into the festive summer evening. And see there? Halfway across, another spread-eagled body accelerates into view! Competition! The first bounce takes him maybe two feet over people’s heads, the second three, the third five—

The fourth should orbit the guy. Instead it lands him off the blanket, body lengths away in the crowd. Now the first crew’s found another human volleyball and started up again. They’re joined by a third. And a fourth.

And the moment finally comes—time is splendid and inexorable—Bill Graham in the spotlight, a little thinner and weirder than last season, still sharp eyed, sharp edged as an aging buccaneer. “Ladies and Gentlemen, for the first time in three years—their seventh American tour—their third Day on the Green—from London, Rollo McInery, Nicki Cavanaugh, Harlan Parr, Tommi Rhymer! Welcome Belshangles!”

A sudden onslaught of sound and vision: a light blast exploding out over that compact forest of upstretched human arms and hands, sweeping the rosy waving flesh like a bed of coral polyps at the bottom of the sea.

Wish that all the lovers

I ever had were you:

Well I wish that all the lovers

I ever had were you.

What’s fast is too soon past

And the past turns future fast—

And it’s much too late for gettin’,

But you must admit the wishin’s new.

Wish you were the only

Traffic on my road:

Well I wish you were the only

Traffic on my road:

For you its concrete eight lanes wide

Top speed four lanes to a side—

Little red flag behind you

Sayin’ Caution: extra long load

So on down to the very final chorus, as the whole great crowd, holding up the appropriate fingers, chanted with him:

—MACH ONE!

MACH TWO!

MACH THREE—

Just SO long,

SO long sweet lover

As you don’t mock ME.

Time hastens. All the best shows are too soon over. The crowd shuffles out onto the concrete ramps, dazed and lowing like thirsty cattle. Knowing pain, withdrawal, loss for which there is no cure.

This young guy stumbling along behind me is practically shouting to the sky, “Oh God, I’ve seen what I wanna be when I grow up, and the job’s already taken!” You think that’s a funny line? Turn around and check his face. Not funny. “There’s gotta be room in the world for more of them! You think they could use a road company?”

I made it home and into bed unchallenged, and greeted in the quiet my usual concert after-symptoms: the high steady singing in my right ear and a kind of shimmery rustle in the left, like distant tambourines.

———

I don’t make the turn too elegantly; a steep left hairpin down into darkness. Then a tooth-rattling eyeball-bouncing cattle guard (Tom sits up rigid, like somebody goosed him), and a row of little white diamond-shaped signs with inspirational messages:

Side View of Chainsaw, Must Use Spark Arresters!

Side View of Motorcycle: Must Use Spark Arresters!

Side View of Cigarette: Crush All Smokes!

Side View of Nothing: Enjoy Your National Forest!

Twenty miles to go. Down the ridge I stutter in the log truck ruts and across the dam. Buck and sideslip up the far ridge, jitter down. Along Bright’s Creek, and across the bridge. El Dorado National Forest: Land of Many Uses.

One of the many happens to be logging.

The past two summers’ Federal Timber Sales have butchered half the woods between our property and Bright’s Creek. Big diesel Cats hauling off corpses of trees I’ve personally known since childhood have chewed all bloody hell out of the place. I wonder what the puzzled roots think, left in the ground. The bark still grows and tries to heal on them. The sap still flows. Death comes slowly.

Certain whimsy to National Forest signs: right out at the back of beyond you come on cryptic little wooden strips:

Leech Lake trailhead, 2.7 miles

Upper Franchiere (site) 3.8 miles

Snatch Springs 7 miles

Well here, in the middle of what looks like World War I, one of those small ecologically inoffensive strips says

Pardee Camp (private) 2 miles

We are farther from the world than we were.

They blocked our road at the timber sale boundary with cratered earth and splintered logs. We have to drive off south around a ridge and back, and join the stub of our past below the meadow. Fewer people come here by mistake.

Congress swelled Mokulumne Wilderness Area by 15,000 acres; it rubs uneasily against our eastern property line, as logging does against the west. Fiddler’s Lake is closed to vehicles now. One guy who’d fished in there for years defied the signs and drove in anyway. They made him take his jeep apart and pack it out.

Congress could take Pardee for wilderness, Papa says. And will, some year. Private ownership, like private love, doesn’t have much impact on their planning.

But the trick is, none of that really shows from Pardee Meadow. A quarter mile of our own trees stand tall between. Tom doesn’t know. And like a peculiarly modern Quasimodo, crying “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” where there is no sanctuary, hauling my Esmeralda (for the second time) up a bell tower the Church condemns for demolition—

I think that I won’t tell him.

My sanctuary is the Forest of the Night: less a tower than a journey underground. Here tree trunks grow to secret columns between floor and roof. Darkness amputates distance; there is no sky. Young trees crowd to meet us, combing their spikey hands along the car. Suddenly, we’ve arrived.

“You know. I got a question I’m afraid to ask.” Whispering on the porch. “How’d you get me in here? The time when I—y’know.”

“Carried you.”

“With your friend?”

“All by my lonesome.”

“My face is red.”

“Doesn’t look red from here.”

The rickety front porch at Pardee is black, moonless subterranean as the inmost gallery of a mine. The meadow is a vaulted hall; I see glowworms on the ceiling.

“Y’have the keys?”

“Oh, sorry.”

He told me to prop the door. Then he boosted my rear to the porch rail, and gathered me into his arms.

And I’m remembering something (he circled around in the dark close room) about being borne up on eagles’ wings—until his shins came up against an old sofa. We tumbled onto it: instant replay of the backseat in Carson City, only this was the remix, the extended play.

“We haven’t had our champagne yet!”

“Don’t shout, I’m right here, y’know.”

Together we went out and carried in his bag, his fiddle, our champagne, to where the kitchen light made an almost infinitesimal puddle of home comfort in the enormous blackness of the woods.

Papa eases his champagne corks out a micron at a time. Tom comes from a different school of celebration I can tell; he fires his off the ceiling.

“Have you a hammer in this place? Come on, I bet y’do. Nails too, what?” He took the hammer and a nail selected from the can, and climbing sock-footed onto the Formica table beside the fizzing, fuming poppy-painted bottle, surveyed the ceiling. “There ’tis.” He bent his knees and bit his lip, and ceremoniously nailed the champagne cork into the dent it generated. I admired the droll figure that he made, all long spidery arms and legs against the kitchen light. Taking a gold pen from his breast pocket, he wrote, there on the ceiling beside the cork:

Thomas Peter Rhymer

Miranda Dolores Falconer

August 17, l986

One glass for him. One for me. Second glass for him. Second for me. Third glass for him. I’m gazing up into the light. Wonder how it feels to be a moth and spin around it.

“Problem?”

“I’ve never split a bottle of champagne.”

“You want I should finish that?”

“Thought you didn’t drink anymore.”

“A man can’t be stone cold sober on his wedding night,” he said. “Well, it’s not proper. Y’got to pay tradition some respect.”

It was all gone, anyway.

“Y’want to stay here, or camp out like we did?” He waited. Except for light that flowed in from the kitchen, the little bedroom was broom-closet dark. “Whose bed is it anyway? Your parents’?”

“Grandparents.’”

“Well that settles it: we stay here.”

I’m thinking. My grandmother hauled it from some old body’s attic when she was a bride, butched the legs and painted it (walnut country gothic was out as out in 1929), and then, when they bought real furniture, it came up here, and since their time my parents slept in it—

“Y’know—” he said, “—been eying the cut of that dress all afternoon, conjecturing—” He slipped his thumbs inside the neckline, just above both collarbones, and popped it deftly outward off my shoulders. “Ah.”

I said “Whoops!” or something like it, followed by “Wait! Wait!” The bra straps followed the shoulders they were pinned to. The sleeves were peeling inside out now, two long reptilian sheddings: soon I’d have no hands for anything. It all went down as far as my waist, and stuck.

I got inside the front; unsnapped the bra. “There.”

The thumbs continued their smooth passage down my sides. When they reached the waistband of my panty hose, they simply slipped inside. Every hair all over my whole body stood on end.

Dress, bra, hose and two quiet hands progressed toward the floor. When the thumbs reached the top of my briefs, those joined the party and went on downward with the rest.

Tom knelt, freed my left foot, naked, from dress and hose and briefs and shoe, kissed and set it naked on the wooden floor. The right followed, neat and clean and kind. It made me want to cry. If only he could get those thumbs inside that straightjacket euphemism of modesty, and slip it simply to the floor as all the rest.

Tom stood up and said, “Now me.”

It was a proper giggle; it was better than the wine. Standing naked in the dark, playing Easter hunt for little pearly rounds on a smooth cotton front. The last two were down inside his belt. I had to tug his shirttails out, steam pressed from being next to him.

Without the belt the cotton trousers found the floor all on their own. Kneeling on a pile of my own clothes, I picked his feet up like a pony’s and slipped away the cotton socks.

His shoes were under the kitchen table. His hips were a slender silhouetted blackness inches from my face. If he had on any briefs, I couldn’t see where they began or ended.

A vertigo’d mountaineer discovers going down and going up suddenly, and equally, unfeasible. Arms around his legs I clung, cheek pressed abruptly tight to body warmth, silky skin, hot clean smell.

“Well,” he said, “I thought you were going to make love to me for real this time, not just in your mind.” He waited for something to happen. “It’s easy. It comes with the body.”

With his, maybe: not with mine.

“Problem.”

“Yeah.”

“What.”

“I don’t feel like much of a woman.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t much feel like one.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like something else. Don’t know.”

“What.”

“A mind with eyes.”

“Huh,” he said, hoisting me by the elbows. “Let’s have a go.” The go he had was extensive. “You feel like a woman to me. Well, don’t you suppose I’d know?”

I did suppose. His whole front was up against my front, warm as summer and much more tangible. And I didn’t suppose he was faking. Not exactly. Oh, if only I could wrap him all the way around, and go to sleep inside.

“You feel exactly like a woman. Say I’m telling you the truth. C’mon. Saying’s easy.”

“You’re—telling me—”

“—and you taste just like my woman, and you—”

“What.”

He planted his nose against me and drew in, as if he could inhale me to the bottom of his lungs. If I were inside him, he would be my outside. I’d be wearing him. My battered but beautiful coat of many colors.

“—Smell exactly—like—”

“Like.”

“Like you’ve got the hots for me.”

Ridiculously true. No room at all for disagreement. And he did have briefs, because he found my thumbs and hooked them in the waistband.

“All right. Now say, you’re going to make love to me, because you’ve wanted to forever; longer than I’ve known you were alive. Say it.”

“Can’t.”

“Say it.”

“Can’t.”

Is saying easy? Is it? Is it? What I wanted, the only thing I wanted, was to submit to him. And now it seemed, even saying that might be impossibly difficult.

Whereas, in reality—it wasn’t hard at all.

Monday, August 18

Black dark. The moon had come and gone.

He reached out, keeping one hand on my wrist, and groped a light on. Scars. Two deep grooves below the wrist, growing shallow down the outside of my arm.

“I put myself through a glass door once.”

He raised a face of pure dismay.

“I call ’em my suicide scars, but it wasn’t on purpose. There’s a number more: it all took fifty stitches.”

Dismay mellowed to relief, and relief to cunning. He switched the light off. Some time later, a finger planted on my forearm. Back on with the light.

“Uh-huh. That’s one.”

The little shield-shaped scar, where one long sliver stuck straight in. He eyed it silently, a marred place on his property. Lights off.

Close to morning he turned it on again; he’d found the ziggy lightning bolt scar on the heel of my right thumb and the “zipper” down the middle finger. He turned my brown hand over in the light, surveying for more damage.

“That’s it,” I said, “You’ve seen the lot.”

He found the small white line that rings the outside of my little finger, from ball to nail.

“That’s not one, I did that to myself the first time I saw oysters growing wild; I was prying ’em off rocks with Papa’s jackknife and eating ’em on the spot, up to my knees in water and nobody anywhere around, and the knife closed up on me. I cried; I thought I’d bleed to death, but the oysters were such fine little things, I kept on prying.”

That got the slow grin, and the lights out, finally.

“Hey—” he said, “We’re not so very different, are we?”